This paper presents a case study of the use of a repeated single-criterion card sort with an unusually large, diverse participant group. The study, whose goal was to elicit novice programmers' knowledge of programming concepts, involved over
We present seven case-studies of undergraduate recruitment to Computer Science courses together with analysis of students' success during the early part of their study. We focus particularly upon qualification on entry, the subjects studied in the early university curriculum, and student grades.We find that while university admissions are complex processes, there exists sufficient commonality to permit some useful comparisons. These suggest that predicting undergraduate performance on the basis of entry qualifications is fraught. Nevertheless, it seems that students who arrive at university with a record of success in earlier studies may be more likely to succeed than otherwise. In particular, good grades in pre-university study may indicate that they are more likely to do well in the mathematical part of the university curriculum. Conversely, we find nothing in entry qualifications to indicate which students will be successful in the study of programming.
Novice programmer knowledge contains a mixture of wellformed, in-transition and muddled conceptual structures. In this paper we describe an analysis of the in-transition and muddled items that are not fully integrated into the novices' cognitive structures. When participants were asked to perform card sorts of programming concepts into categories, 23% of their categories were "ragbags": categories with names such as "don't know," "not sure," or "not applicable" that indicate that the students have little or no knowledge of the concepts placed in those categories.In this study, we find that there are distinct differences in the uses of the ragbags. In particular, we find that terms considered more abstract tend to be placed into Don't Know and Not Sure ragbags more often than concrete terms; and students categorized as low performers tend to use Not Sure far more often than high performers but Don't Know and Not Applicable less often. We also find evidence that the meaningfulness of a concept is likely to be related to the vocabulary used in the classroom, suggesting that students may assimilate abstract concepts into their conceptual structures more quickly if one uses the terms more frequently.
We present some ideas for course material for the introductory teaching of programming that are based on the principle of allowing the students to be the domain experts. The idea is that the students' familiarity with the domain of discourse will make course material more motivating, and that it will be more likely that they will be able to model the concepts and artifacts being discussed. This approach thereby seeks to scaffold the students' understanding of programming-related concepts. For reasons discussed in the paper, we have chosen mobile phone technology for this discussion, but there is no reason why the same principles should not be applied to other culturally-accessible domains.
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